Tuesday 17 Jan 2012

Award winning American novelist Anne Patchett talks about her book State of Wonder. Her heroine is is a medical researcher, who's sent deep into the Amazon to investigate the death of her lab partner. But when she gets there she discovers an Amazonian tribe in which women remain fertile until they die.

The Algonquin Hotel is one of America's best known with a literary heritage. It's smack bang in the middle of downtown Manhattan and was the place some of New York's best known poets, short story writers, editors, playwrights, columnists and critics met regularly for lunch during the roaring twenties. This collection of writers became known as the Algonquin Round Table. We take a tour of The Algonquin to discover its history and in particular the life of one of its regular visitors Dorothy Parker, a sharp tongued woman who was a poet, short story writer and New York's only female theatre critic at the time.

Monday 16 Jan 2012

Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobsen talks about his new collection of columns, Whatever It Is I Don't Like It. That's the title of Howard Jacobsen's new book, it's a collection of his columns for London's Independent Newspaper, published over the years.